Forward of potential IPO, TikTok father or mother firm hires first CFO

Diving letter:

  • ByteDance, the Beijing-based tech company valued at nearly $ 200 billion that was brought into contact with the Trump administration on national security grounds, has hired its first CFO, Shou Zi Chew, a move that largely is interpreted as a sign of an imminent IPO.

  • Chew will arrive at ByteDance, which owns the video-sharing platform TikTok, on March 29, after almost six years with the Beijing-based smartphone giant Xiaomi Technology.

  • “I will soon be joining ByteDance as CFO and returning to Singapore, my hometown,” Chew wrote in one Wednesday tweet. The new CFO role will be ByteDance’s only C-suite position alongside CEO and co-founder Zhang Yiming. Reuters reported.

Dive Insight:

Chew has been President of Xiaomi’s International Business since 2019. Before that, he was CFO for almost five years.

While Chew was CFO in 2018, Xiaomi was went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, which it for third most important publicly traded smartphone manufacturer, behind Apple and Samsung.

He began his career as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and later received his MBA from Harvard Business School.

Chew’s hiring at ByteDance follows months of US-China tension arising from former President Donald Trump’s allegations that TikTok poses a threat to national security.

Last year threatened the Trump administration Prohibit Tik Tok and sell their US operations to a group of American companies. After losing Trump in a second term, the acquisition deal was “suspended indefinitely,” according to the Wall Street Journal reported.

President Joe Biden’s administration has suspended the lawsuit that could have resulted in a “de facto ban” on TikTok’s presence in the US, Reuters said.

With support from General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital, ByteDance completed a $ 180 billion fundraising round in December: the most valuable private market funding round in history. In 2020 alone, sales more than doubled to around 35 billion US dollars.

ByteDance has been considering listing its properties, including the Chinese version of TikTok called Douyin in Hong Kong said Bloomberg.

TikTok, ByteDance’s flagship, is one of the most popular apps in the world with over 100 million American users.

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